Immigration Reform: Obama vs. Everything Good and Sacred

President Obama’s unilateral action on immigration reform has thrown the opposition into confusion. The president’s program will grant millions of undocumented aliens (1) authorization to work, and (2) protection from deportation. Those benefiting are immigrants who have no criminal record and who have been in the U.S. for at least five years. Some immigrants are disappointed with this, particularly those who have lived in the U.S. for 4 years and 364 days.

But the strongest backlash comes from the Republicans who are hostile to the program because it violates their most fundamental principles, the ones that say anything Obama does is un-American and evil. Quite a few of them have accused President Obama of trashing the Constitution and becoming even more of a hideous dictator than he already is.

The New York Times quoted contractor Joey Hartline of Alabama who said he wanted President Obama “…arrested and tried for treason.” According to Mr. Hartline, Obama’s reform is an act of “domestic terrorism.”

Hartline, an ordinary citizen, is merely echoing his state’s GOP leadership. Republican congressman Mo Brooks, for example, wants to throw Obama in jail for five years. Five years doesn’t really seem that long, which puts the Honorable Mo Brooks in danger of being accused of liberalism, especially when it comes on the heels of his claim that he would do “anything short of shooting” undocumented immigrants to stem the alien influx. His unwillingness to shoot immigrants places him well to the left of many Alabama Republicans.

Other Alabamans have been surprisingly unrestrained in their language. Kyle Davis, a former state trooper, angrily declared his opposition to immigration reform because “…a big majority of them’s dirty” (NYT). 

Mr. Davis obviously belongs to the Tea Party wing of the GOP, aka, the “them’s dirty” wing.

Republicans from other red states are naturally unwilling to be outdone by these Alabamans. Texas Senator Ted Cruz compared Obama to the Emperor Cataline, who tried to overthrow the Roman Republic, while Representative Lamar Smith (also from the Lone Star State) said that through his executive order, Obama had declared war on the American people. I’m pretty sure that’s against the law, so we might want to wait to see how many years Representative Smith thinks the president should spend behind bars.

Republican Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, who leads the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, denounced President Obama in a bitterly partisan attack which he insisted reflected neither a Republican nor a Democratic perspective.*

The visceral hostility of Tea Party Republicans has put the GOP leadership in a bind. People like Speaker John Boehner and soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell want to express their vitriolic hatred of Obama, but they nevertheless recognize that immigration reform will help the people they truly care about, i.e., those people who happen to be corporations.

Cheap labor is good for profits, and cheap labor is exactly what immigrants have long supplied to the American economy. Furthermore, GOP leaders are worried that going along with the “them’s dirty” mentality of many Tea Party types makes it harder for Republicans to pretend to not be racists.

The Establishment GOP narrative agrees with the Tea Party base in claiming that Obama is both totally incompetent and an all-powerful dictator. One point this narrative makes is that, in a clumsy, doomed-to-fail Stalinist maneuver, Obama provided health care to millions of impoverished Americans.

  First, I offer zem insurance, and zen, I enslave zem!   Mwahahahaha!

So what options does the GOP leadership have? As of now confusion seems to reign, but that may not continue for long. According to my mole in the Republican Establishment (who has been known to sometimes tell me the truth) the GOP leadership is not planning to formally oppose Obama’s executive order, but will mount a major publicity campaign to ensure the loyalty of the “them’s dirty” voters. This campaign will include a constant barrage of legalistic criticism aimed at the president. Strategist Ana Navarro, for example, admitted that President Reagan granted amnesty to immigrants through an executive order. Her legalistic argument was that Reagan could do this but Obama could not because, unlike Obama, Reagan was “a trusted leader.”

My inside source also leaked to me a secret GOP plan to motivate the base with a contest in which the winner will be that voter who comes up with the most effective anti-immigrant sound bite. Previously publicized phrases such as “calves as big as cantaloupes” and “them’s dirty,” will be disqualified, but party leaders believe this still leaves plenty of room for inventiveness. The winner will receive an attractive painting on black velvet depicting Mitch McConnell kicking Cesar Chavez in the groin.

Can this two-pronged attack offer any hope of holding the GOP together until 2016? As they say in Texas ¿quién sabe?

                                    Cesar Chavez 1927-2003

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*Note to politicians: never forget to follow up your partisan onslaughts with the claim that your issue is “neither Democratic nor Republican.”

White People Are Awesome

White people are awesome! We really are. – John Oliver

J-Ol said this in the context of his enthusiastic review of The Help, a film in which an awesome white lady showed her bigoted neighbors what’s what as she led the struggle for civil rights way back when. Actually, I haven’t seen The Help, so this description is based only on reviews and other secondhand sources. But I think I know enough to appreciate John Oliver’s snarkiness.






John Oliver - Awesome Guy







 
When the civil rights movement gained steam in the 1960s, a lot of us liberal white people found ourselves well positioned to feel good about ourselves. You might say, paraphrasing Churchill, that “never in the field of human conflict have so many benefited so much for doing so little.” Really, all a guy had to do in those years to feel good about himself was not be a raging bigot. It was awesome (for some of us).

Of course, the story of racism is by no means over, despite what bigoted blowhards like Rush Limbaugh would have us believe. The more I learn about the way racial prejudice works and has worked, the more complex, occasionally subtle and downright horrifying it seems. A wise and gentle white woman of my acquaintance has said more than once, on reading about racial abuses of the past, that she would have wanted to explode with rage had people treated her daughter the way African American children were customarily treated in the past. Naturally, exploding with rage was not an option for those tens of millions of African American parents who wanted to remain alive for the long-term benefit of their children.

I have heard some white folks say things like, “What about black prejudice against whites?!” Yes, I’m guessing there is some of that out there. I wonder where it comes from.

But back to the real problem: Racism has gone underground to an extent, but it is still very much with us. And, though it can be found far and wide, it is most pronounced among those who call themselves conservative. Last Tuesday in the New York Times, an article by David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam (Crashing the Tea Party) pointed out that Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly white and “they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.”

Imagine, if you will, that scientists have invented a Bigot-o-meter that measures the intensity of racial and ethnic prejudice of individuals and gives them a score from 10 (Rush Limbaugh) to 0 (Mohandas Gandhi). If everyone with a score of over 2.5 were denied the right to vote, I believe the Tea Party would lose most of its influence. In fact, the Republican Party as a whole would have trouble winning any elections at the national level.

Absent a Bigot-o-meter, there are other ways to identify people who harbor in their hearts more prejudice than becomes a fair-minded and reasonable person. One indicator is an individual’s approach toward the immigration issue.

Now we know that there are millions of immigrants who have come into this country from Mexico and other Latin American countries without legal documentation or have been born to such people. They have come here to escape economic hardship in their home countries, and they have found that many American corporations will make it easy for them to get jobs as fruit pickers and such. You could say that these companies have offered these low-paid workers a welcome mat, and we who have been able to buy inexpensive fruit and vegetables due to low labor costs, have benefited from this arrangement.

Obviously, this is no way to police a border or organize an economy. Something needs to be done. But what a given individual claims should be done is a litmus test of prejudice almost as accurate as the imaginary Bigot-o-meter.

If you see someone angrily denouncing these undocumented aliens, insisting on labeling them as “illegal,” claiming that “anchor babies” present a huge problem for us, declining to acknowledge the benefits that some corporations derive from this cheap and docile work force, refusing to acknowledge the economic benefits we as purchasers of inexpensive foods enjoy, and refusing to acknowledge that the services these workers purchase ultimately result in job creation, then I’d say you’re looking at about the equivalent of an 8.5 on the Big-o-meter.

Of course anti-immigrant bigotry isn’t the only kind of racism that still flourishes in the seedier corners of our society, but it is the one that now stands front and center in our ongoing political debate. If we could all work together - black people, white people, immigrants and so on - to get a handle on the real problems that a leaky border engenders, and do so without the anti-Hispanic vitriol that pollutes current discussions, then maybe we would have a right to say that we Americans are awesome, and we wouldn’t have to specify color to do so.